AT THE END OF JULY I TOOK ROSSA to Paris, where we had not been for a long time. We stayed in a little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I wanted to feel free in a place where writers are respected, where many important books have been written. The list of artists who lived and worked in Paris during the twentieth century is endless and even though that world has now disappeared completely, you still breathe in an atmosphere that, every so often, I feel a need for. It’s still possible to sit down in a café, order a drink and write for hours without being disturbed. The truth is that I went there because, as I obsessed over the possibility or not of writing a book about Sax, I had the feeling I had lost my way. I was confused. So I decided first of all to recover possession of my identity as a writer.
As soon as we arrived we went out for a stroll. I told Rossa that I consider rue Visconti the most beautiful street in the world. She seemed puzzled. I pointed out a small two-story house where Racine died in 1675. Then I took her to rue des Grands-Augustins, where Picasso used to live.
The next day, we had lunch at Benoît’s, an old restaurant, with two French friends. We were talking about literature and one of them, a refined intellectual who teaches in the United States, came out with a violent tirade against Sartre:
“If French literature has gone stale, it’s partly his fault. He left a blot of black ink. His pupils are intelligent, but who gives a damn for intelligence? You have to be much more than that. Kundera is a novelist, but he’s not French. There aren’t any writers like Gide any more!”
Rossa had fun, but she is worried by other things, she is afraid of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism that, according to her, could trigger a total war.
On our way back to the hotel, in rue de Seine she asked me:
“Where can you live in peace?”
“In Patagonia,” I replied without hesitation.
And she:
“My sister always wanted to send our brother Massimo to Patagonia!”
A bomb could destroy the museums, the paintings, the monuments. I knew this well because years before I had been in Afghanistan and I had seen the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Walking along the Quai Voltaire, I showed Rossa Sennelier, an old shop that sells canvases, colours, pencils, brushes and turpentine. It was very hot and Rossa was walking idly, a little indolent. I found her more and more beautiful. We had been making love for many years and ours was like a long amorous conversation, without interruptions.
She has really beautiful long legs, and a wonderful little mouth. She still smelled like a child and had an attractive, good smile. She was a woman who loved to laugh and have fun and she never talked of her sorrows. If need be, she would keep her distance, and she was never indiscreet. Without a doubt she was vain and liked to look at herself naked in the mirror, to see that her body was still young, enviable. A solitary person, she detested social life. But she loved to dance; it was as if she had a drop of African or Brazilian blood, which sometimes made her uncontrollable, wild. We would talk a lot but we could be silent too. In the early days of our relationship we used to argue, but then the fights grew fewer and we learnt to understand each other. We didn’t want anyone to interfere with our life.
We felt so good in Paris that I would have liked to stop time, so that summer would never end. The thought of the short, cold winter days made me feel terribly sad.
During those days I would have liked to be able to paint Rossa’s portrait, but the truth was that I had another vice, that of giving my pen free rein and inventing stories. To capture on paper a state of mind, a place, a thought. Perhaps I could have portrayed Rossa better with a pen than with brushes. She could become my model for a book. It would have been much better to drop Sax and get inside the head of the woman I loved. She was elusive when I asked her about past affairs. All I got was sketchy allusions. Sometimes, if she told me of certain things in her life before we met, I would be amused; at other times I grew jealous because I couldn’t bear the idea that she had had other men, other experiences before me. Life as a couple is like that. What counts is your partner’s story, because you already know the truth about yourself. We all recount our past in our own way. I remember that Rossa attached great importance to her photographs, which she guarded jealously. One day, as we were watching a scene from a film by Truffaut, in which the leading lady was cutting up some photographs with scissors, she had said to me:
“You shouldn’t cut them up, it’s like erasing fragments of your own life. You destroy them and all the evidence is gone for ever.”